The source code of the suite was released in July 2000, creating a free, open source office suite called OpenOffice.org, which subsequent versions of StarOffice were based on, with additional proprietary components.[3]

In March 2009, a study showed that StarOffice only had a 3% market share in the corporate market.[4]

In April 2011, Oracle announced the discontinuation of Oracle Open Office[1] as part of the decision to turn OpenOffice.org into a "purely community-based project".[5]

StarWriter 1.0 was written by Marco Börries in 1985 for the Zilog Z80. Börries formed StarDivision in Lüneburg the following year.[6] It was later ported to the AmstradCPC (marketed by Schneider in Germany) under CP/M, and later the Commodore 64 under Microsoft BASIC,[citation needed] which was later ported to the 8086-based Amstrad PC-1512, running under MS-DOS 3.2. Later, the integration of the other individual programs followed as the development progressed to an Office Suite for DOS, IBM's OS/2 Warp, and for the Microsoft Windows operating-system. From this time onwards StarDivision marketed its suite under the name "StarOffice."

Until version 4.2, StarDivision based StarOffice on the cross-platformC++class library StarView. In 1998 StarDivision began offering StarOffice for free.

Sun Microsystems acquired the company, copyright and trademark of StarOffice in 1999 for US$73.5 million,[7] as it was supposedly cheaper than 42,000 licenses of Microsoft Office.[8]

StarSuite, the version of StarOffice with Asian language localization, included Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese interfaces. It also included additional fonts for the East Asian market, resulting in slightly larger installation footprint. Otherwise the features were identical to StarOffice.

The two brands existed because a StarOffice brand was owned by another company in certain Asian countries.[9] Currently NEC produces StarOffice collaborative software in Japan.[10] After Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems (in January 2010) it renamed both StarOffice and StarSuite as "Oracle Open Office".[11]

5.2 was released 20 June 2000.[22] Sun offered StarOffice 5.2 as a free download for personal use, and soon went through an exercise similar to Netscape's relicensing of Mozilla, by releasing most of the StarOffice source code under a free/open source license. The resultant free/open source software codebase fork continued development as OpenOffice.org, with contributions from both Sun and the wider OpenOffice.org community. Sun then took "snapshots" of the OpenOffice.org code base, integrated proprietary and third-party code modules, and marketed the package commercially.

StarOffice 5.2 was the last version to contain the programs listed under Older Discontinued Components. It was also the last version to support multiple virtual desktops, previously available from within the Suite.

On 15 December 2010, Oracle released Oracle Open Office 3.3, based on OpenOffice.org 3.3 beta, and a web-based version called Oracle Cloud Office.[31][32] The suite was released in two versions, sold at €39 and €49.95.[32]

Traditionally, StarOffice licenses sold for around US$70, but in 2004, Sun planned to offer subscription-based licenses to Japanese customers for about ¥1,980 (US$17) per year (Becker, 2004). P. Ulander, a desktop products manager for Sun, acknowledged that Sun planned to expand subscription-based licenses to other countries as well. As of January 2009[update] Sun's website offered StarOffice for US$34.95.[33]

Sun used a per-person license for StarOffice, compared to the per-device licenses used for most other proprietary software. An individual purchaser gains the right to install the software on up to five computers. For example, a small-business owner can have the software on laptop, office and home computers, or a user with a computer running Microsoft Windows, and another running Linux, can install StarOffice on both computers.

In 2010 StarOffice 9 Software was no longer offered free of charge to education customers, but StarOffice 8 could still be used without charge. The free OpenOffice.org 3.0, with the same functionality as StarOffice 9, could also be used. Sun also offered free web-based training and an online tutorial for students and teachers, free support services for teachers (including educational templates for StarOffice) and significantly discounted technical support for schools.

^Hillesley, Richard (21 June 2010). "OpenOffice at the crossroads: Every bug is a feature". The H Open. Heinz Heise. p. 2. Archived from the original on 8 December 2013. Retrieved 20 June 2013. Simon Phipps, now an ex-Sun employee, later claimed that 'The number one reason why Sun bought StarDivision in 1999 was because, at the time, Sun had something approaching forty-two thousand employees. Pretty much every one of them had to have both a Unix workstation and a Windows laptop. And it was cheaper to go buy a company that could make a Solaris and Linux desktop productivity suite than it was to buy forty-two thousand licenses from Microsoft.'